Wednesday, September 13, 2017

MORE CATHOLIC THAN THE #MAGA POPE

You probably know that Steve Bannon has said that he wants to be Trump's "wingman":

Steve Bannon left the White House because the Trump administration "needed a wingman outside" and now wants to help get allies of President Donald Trump elected to the Senate, he said Tuesday at a global investment conference.

Bannon delivered a keynote address in Hong Kong on the subject of "American economic nationalism, the populist revolt and Asia" at an event organized by Hong Kong brokerage firm CLSA....

"I left the White house because Trump needed a wingman outside, helping candidates for the Senate," Bannon said, according to a global investor who attended the talk.

But here's what this means to Bannon in the case of Alabama: Breitbart is promoting the guy running against Trump's candidate as if he is Trump's candidate. Remember that Trump endorsed Luther Strange in Alabama's special Senate election. Breitbart prefers former "Ten Commandments judge" Roy Moore. Breitbart is not just running stories in praise of Moore -- it's describing Moore as the true Trump candidate:

... The Great America Alliance, an organization that hosted a number of events backing President Donald Trump last year in his successful bid to defeat Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, is hitting the ground in Alabama with a bus tour for Judge Roy Moore and a series of events and television ads to back up the top conservative candidate. This development is yet another crushing blow to the failing campaign of Washington establishment-backed Luther Strange....

In a press release announcing the bus tour and television ads, Andy Surabian—until a couple weeks ago a top Trump White House official who previously served in a senior Trump campaign position during last year’s election—lit into Strange and praised Moore.

... “In order to truly drain the DC swamp, we must reject Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked yes-men in favor of those who truly back President Trump’s America First Agenda. Judge Moore has proven to be a fearless leader for Alabama and we are confident that he will never buckle in the fight to help President Trump Make America Great Again.”

... Surabian, the ex-White House aide for President Trump who is now a senior adviser to the Great America Alliance, added in an exclusive quote for Breitbart News that Strange must be defeated for Americans to succeed in draining the swamp and achieving the Trump agenda.

“Big time lobbyist Luther Strange is the exact type of swamp monster that Trump supporters across the country and throughout Alabama want vanquished from Washington, D.C.,” Surabian told Breitbart News.

And even though White House legislative director Marc Short reaffirmed Trump's support for Strange yesterday, the Breitbart story insists that Trump "has ... withdrawn his support for Strange for now."

That's Bannon's idea of being a wingman and helping to "get allies of President Donald Trump elected to the Senate": He decides who's pro-Trump, not Trump.

On the sixteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attacks, President Donald Trump did not once mention the terms “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism” during a commemoration ceremony at the Pentagon.

Those phrases were also not mentioned in speeches today by other Trump administration senior officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Instead of naming the enemy, Trump seemingly went out of his way to use other descriptors in his speech, including “terrorists who attacked us,” “barbaric forces of evil and destruction,” “horrible, horrible enemies,” “enemies of all civilized people,” and “enemies like we’ve never seen before.”

... The uniform lack of the mention of radical Islamic terrorism from the administration Monday comes after previous reports that H.R. McMaster, Trump’s embattled national security adviser, has petitioned against using the phrase.

Bannon and his fellow Breitbartniks believe in Trumpism -- but they reserve the right to define what Trumpism is, and sometimes it's the opposite to what Trump himself is actually doing. They think they're more Catholic than the #MAGA pope.